Stick to baseball, 3/6/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 30 prospects in this year’s draft class, with the caveat of course that we’ll likely see a lot of movement this spring because most college players didn’t play at all last summer or fall. I also answered some questions on the Padres’ farm system for our beat writer Dennis Lin. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week is Aaron Fitt of D1baseball.com, talking about this year’s draft class, Kumar Rocker vs. Jack Leiter, and other topics around college baseball. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

The latest edition of my free email newsletter was about how it feels when the face in the mirror finally starts to catch up with your biological age. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6^th.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: WIRED looks at the strange economy of scandals in Hollywood and the man who often inserts himself into the deals made around them.
• In 1963, Alderman Ben Lewis, a rising political figure in Chicago and one of the most powerful Black men in the city government, was killed in his office, execution-style, but the city made sure not to investigate it thoroughly. ProPublica examines why not, and whether the police may have been involved in the murder.
• Anti-vaxxers are now misusing federal data to lie about COVID-19 vaccines, claiming they pose dangers that aren’t supported by evidence. Alex Berenson, once a promising New York Times reporter, has now gone from cannabis alarmist to COVID-19 denialist to full-blown anti-vaxxer, using his sizable Twitter following to encourage fellow deniers and discourage people from getting the vaccine.
• The Washington Post examines the history of lies and fraud that propelled Madison Cawthorn to the House of Representatives.
• From last August, Current Affairs explains that police aren’t the answer if crime isn’t actually the question.
• The Guardian has the story of the battle over the Wentworth golf club in Surrey, England, which they describe as a battle between the rich and the very, very rich.
• Georgia Public Broadcasting has an update on the voter suppression bills currently in the works in the state.
• Kayla Parker, a 25-year-old Black activist, is trying to mobilize Tennessee voters the way Stacey Abrams did in Georgia.
• Dr. Richard Pan, a state Senator in California, writes that anti-vaccine extremism is a form of domestic terrorism.
• David Leonhardt, writing the daily briefing for the New York Times, explains why the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is just as effective as the other two vaccines on the market already, even though misleading headlines show lower efficacy rates.
• The University of Texas is embroiled in a completely avoidable controversy over a racist song sung by some fans of their football team. Some angry white donors sent some rather telling emails to the school, threatening to pull their donations if the racist song was banned, because you can’t have college football if you don’t get to do a racism.
• The Atlantic reports on the success of a small Universal Basic Income experiment in Stockton, California. The United States is the stingiest developed country when it comes to helping people in our lowest income strata. That needs to change if we don’t want to lose the economic and social gains of the last century.
• New York Times opinion page writer David Brooks, who hates millennials but married one anyway, has been taking a second salary from the Weave Project, funded by Facebook and by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ father, without disclosing the potential conflict of interest to his editors or his readers.
• A U.S. diplomat has been railing against Jews and promoting the idea of a Christian nation-state online for years and is somehow still employed by the Foreign Service.
• Wealthy residents of one town in the Florida Keys received COVID-19 vaccines before most of the state … and, oh, hey, a bunch of donors to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) live there.
• Dan Dakich, an announcer for ESPN and a former assistant coach who has denied being there when Bobby Knight choked Neil Reed, doxxed a UNC teacher and threatened to sexually assault an Ursinus professor. Somehow, four days later, ESPN hasn’t suspended him or taken any other action. Sure seems like they move a lot faster when the tweets are about evolution, doesn’t it?
• Former WNBA owner and former Senator Kelly Loeffler lost control of her basketball team to a player whom she refused to meet to discuss their differences of opinion.
• The former head of the agency that oversees the Voice of America racked up over $1 million in taxpayer-funded expenditures to investigate his own employees to find reasons to fire them. I thought the Republicans were the party of smaller government and less waste?
• These transgender athlete bills pushed by Republican lawmakers – who don’t care about athletes of any identities, only about staying in power – are a solution in search of a problem, according to critics of one such bill in Missouri.
• Hundreds of scientists and researchers have signed an open letter to President Biden saying that evidence-based policy should mean decriminalizing sex work. Doing so would be the best way to protect the interests and health of the workers themselves.
• Board Game News: Red Rising, the latest release from publisher Stonemaier Games (Scythe, Charterstone, Pendulum), is now available for pre-order.
• Alderac has a Kickstarter up for Meeples & Monsters that funded fully in just 15 minutes.
• And there’s also a Kickstarter for High Noon, a card-based strategy game for 2+ players, where the first 4000 people to fund the game will get their copies as soon as the Kickstarter closes – the first I’ve seen of this in a board game crowdfunding effort.
• The British Museum offers a look at ten board games from ancient history.
• And finally, watch a doctor dismantle Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s ignorant claims on sex and gender in about 30 seconds.